Appleseed (2005)

This apple ipad thing was awful. I couldn't take more than 10 minutes. Graphics were straight from video game (I think my video-card could render that kind of graphics in real time). Some bitch killed in clichéd matrix -style 10 orcs without breaking sweat and same time macho guys get picked up like cherries from a tree. No dialog whatsoever in first 10 min. Plot seemed to be just shoot and smash everything that moves. I fast forwarded a lot. Still no meaningful dialog. Many modern video games as a lot better and enjoyable cut scenes than what's shown in this movie. I didn't like the anime style so i just quit watching. Final Fantasy (movie) was a lot more impressive in many ways and wasn't half bad movie. You can call FF a movie but this is just some game engine demo. 1/10 stars.

This may or may not contain spoilers so eyeballs beware? Comparing this movie to past anime movies this movie blows those others away, mostly in visuals audio and character development/plot. It was a little weird going from hand drawn frame by frame anime to full CG like in this film. The way they did the CG makes it look like they had like CG bodies and hand drawn textures wrapped around the bodies(meshes), which makes it cool looking. its not like FF spirits within where they try to make it as close to reality as possible. In Appleseed the bodies are locked in place, what i mean is there's no out of bounds animation where the peoples bodies stretch or change with their emotions like in other anime films where you have a big head all of a sudden then the next scene its normal. To me thats childish and kinda ruins the feel of those old school animes.The character movements are based off real people doing the motions, giving it a realistic fluid motion like a real human would. which is awesome.The audio by far was pretty damn good. Whoever did the audio editing/mixing was a pro. Seems like surround sound, but i was using headphones. Just the ability to have a pre-made piece of music from some other artist, and blend it to the action and vary its pitch its crazy.Its like the music was made for the movie, maybe it was, i don't know.The character development was good too. If you have weak "eyeballs" you might cry when you see some scenes. So be warned.Overall I'd very highly recommend that you see this movie. Most visually stunning anime style movie i have ever seen (finial fantasy movies make their characters real looking, this one is like anime style cg) The squeal is coming out in 2007 in japan I hope its as good as this one if not better than this one.

With nice cel-shaded graphics and fantastic CGI in a nice blend, Appleseed will not disappoint the eye. There is enormous attention to detail, reflections, shading and other small things. Many of the scenes, especially involving the giant city complex, could have worked as art if you froze the frame.The story is pretty unoriginal though, which is a shame. I won't tell you anything, but it's likely you'll see references from a wild collection of sources. Characters have varying depth, and some felt like they needed a bit of fleshing out. Lip-sync was so-so and the same goes for most of the voices(in Japanese).Music is cool and futuristic, with a few surprises thrown in(Basement Jaxx? What the?) and fits the scenes nicely. Sound follows the same pedantic attention-to-detail pattern as the animations. The action is very, very cool, even though it's not a pure action fest.While the storyline doesn't feel too much like Manga, the animation really is. Manga eyes can be bugging, but it was OK. The transformer-esquire mechs where really cool even though they were very similar(then again, I've never watched Transformers).So, in closing, is this worthwhile? Sure. It's storyline is not so complex you need to scratch your head, like other anime(Akira or Final Fantasy), and the animation is a feast to the eyes. Give it a try.

There is no denying that Appleseed is a striking film to look at with its use of cel-shaded 3D characters, but I had expected a lot more from this movie and was disappointed.First the imagery, while stunning, had a lot of problems. For me, the biggest problem with it was that while the characters were cel-shaded, the backgrounds has a pseudo-photo-realistic look and so the characters really felt out of place. I would have felt happier with the look of this film if the backgrounds were more in keeping with what you would expect from animated features, ie, hand-drawn backgrounds.Another problem with the imagery showed up during action scenes. At first I couldn't put my finger on it but eventually I realised that there was no motion blur. The result was fast-moving action was extremely jarring and disorienting to watch. Even a limited amount of motion blue here would have helped greatly.However, for me the biggest failing was in the execution of the story. Exposition was handled extremely sloppily in my opinion, with vast amounts of information being reeled off in a couple of scenes that threw off the pacing of the whole movie and were just plain boring to watch. I think the story might have flowed better if the same information was given to us in smaller chunks distributed more evenly throughout the film. The fact that the plot relied heavily on things that sounded like unbelievable pseudo-scientific hand-waving didn't help matters much either.All in all, I'd say go see it for the remarkable CG work, but don't build up expectations of this being a great movie, because it isn't. I couldn't recommend that you buy the DVD of this either, because the bonus material is all in Japanese with only subtitles. An English soundtrack would have made all the difference here.